The Unclosable MS Paint

The Unclosable MS Paint

A tower defense game about stopping graphic design hipsters from closing MS Paint.

How To Play

• Choose your paint bucket fill color.
• Fill any quadrant with that fill color.
• Wipe out any dubious hipsters that match the color in that quadrant.
• See how many hipsters you can thwart before one of them closes MS paint!

Jam Notes

Hi friends. This jam was super fun. Here's how things went for me.

Use of Theme

The theme was Andy Warhol's artwork titled "Campbell's Soup," exhibited in the 1964 exhibit The American Supermarket. I thought that was a funny contrast to the overarching Jam theme of MS Paint. On the one hand, a leading figure in a visual art movement. On the other,  a commonly comically abused art tool from Windows.

So I figured pretentious hipsters who love pop art like Campbell's Soup might hate a program like MS Paint. Therefore in the game, as they run to close MS Paint, they randomly say hipster phrases (many of which I've either said or heard graphic designers say) and they commonly reference Andy Warhol and the pop art movement.

Challenges Followed

• I made all the sound effects and music using only sound from my mouth.
• I only used the default MS Paint color palette.
• I used only Comic Sans for in-game fonts.
• I drew everything with my mouse (no drawing tablet).

Game Notes

For your reference, here's how the difficulty increases in this game over time:

Intensity LevelIntensity TriggerBehaviorLevel 10-20 hipstersOnly 3 colors of hipsters appear at a comfortably slow rate.Level 221-70 hipsters4 colors of hipsters appear and a slightly faster rateLevel 371-150 hipsters4 colors of hipsters appear at a faster rate with random ones running very quickly.Level 4151-250 hipstersAll 5 colors of hipsters now appear and the rate slightly increases further.Level 5251-500 hipstersAll 5 colors appear at the same rate as before, but 2 appear at once more often. The occasionally sprinting hipster runs super fast.Level 6Over 500 hipstersAll 5 colors appear and a rapid rate (sometimes 2 at a time), overall run rates are increased, and there are more common sprinters at the max run rate.

Based on what I found in my play tests, you can't really survive past intensity level 3 without using the hotkeys (QWERT). I also have hipsters that will only run in the bottom left quadrants, then run around the top right quadrant so you can't just button mash that top right quadrant thinking it'll catch everyone.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy playing this game as much as I enjoyed making it! 

Post screenshots of your high scores!